yes, maybe an event ontology is the thing - I have no clue!

Well I will bow out for the present and let the scientists and/or scientific metaphysicians try to achieve some ground of agreement.

ETA Feser contributes a chapter on "Motion in Aristotle, Newton and Einstein" to a volume, edited by himself, entitled Aristotle on Mind and Metaphysics (2013). I'll read his paper now plus some of the other ones and report anything that I can manage not to gum up.

Last edited by ficino (10/31/2017 9:50 am)

I think I can see the understanding that metaphysics "underlies" physical science, and I used to agree with this assertion without thinking much about it when I was first introduced to the ideas. But now I do not know what RomanJoe means by saying 'an explanation of change as such': It seems he's merely given a particular definition to the word 'change'; Jeremy Taylor, why is an argument 'needed' to show how change is possible? What do you even mean by the phrase, 'how change is possible'? 'how X is possible' I think means, "what causes can make X into a reality", i.e. "what can cause X". (for example, X = ice to melt) By insisting that 'change' itself be a /situation/ rather than a verb, I think you are effectively 'begging the question' by assuming from the beginning the Aquinas-definition of 'change'. If, rather, 'change' is simply a verb meaning X goes to Y, then "How is change possible?" is a meaningless question, an improper combination of words: The listener must respond by seeking clarification, "How which change is possible?" If you intend to ask about all things that change, then the answer is trite: "Each effect appears to have its own cause."

I would like to try to focus attention directly on my problem that this metaphysics Feser presents is not necessarily 'real', but rather a model we've created:

Suppose a man surveys a river near a forest, and declares that there's potential to build a bridge over the river, that the river "has the potential to be bridged". At this point, all we know clearly exists is the man, the river, and the forest. The "potential" the man sees in the system is his own idea about what is possible in the future. He does not see this 'potential' the same way that he sees 'the river'. It does not exist in the same way. It does not clearly exist at all. What appears to exist, rather, is that his interaction with the river and forest triggered his neurons to synapse in certain ways. My concern is that Feser and others (any argument leading to God from this metaphysics) is declaring that this potential is "real", actually exists regardless of the man's presence, whereas it appears to me this potential is only a word used to refer to the man's own thinking, an idea generated by himself.

Indeed, he could try to build the bridge, find that the current is too strong, or the trees suffering termites, and then he later declare that he was mistaken, that it is impossible for that system to support a bridge! Hence that 'potential' was indeed merely a euphemism for what he thought the future could be, not a real thing existing that we "discover".

So when we see Feser's rubber ball, when someone says, "this can be melted," (or squeezed, etc) that potential appears to me to not be a real entity, but only an idea the man has about the future. Indeed, much of magic shows are getting the audience to make such misunderstandings, the point being that the reality is what exists (the atoms, chemical bonds) and what we think about it is in our own minds (our own neural connections) and may or may not correspond to the future state of affairs. So when someone says 'the ball has the potential to be melted', that is merely a model he has created in his mind; he has not clearly 'discovered' a 'potential' that actually exists.

The problem, then, is that this system leading to God's existence as 'pure actuality' requires that these potentials be real things themselves, right? Otherwise it's meaningless to say that "God lacks potential", because of course X wouldn't have something that doesn't actually exist to be had.

Do you understand my problem? Trying now to summarize or more fully articulate it:

So this system of thought using the definitions 'potentiality' and 'actualization' is a description of what we see, in the same way that our mathematical models are descriptions of what we see. (Because they are both mental models, descriptions of what we see, they can be held in competition. Indeed, there is no logical requirement of mathematics to conceive of "a potential being actualized"; one merely follows observed patterns of arithmetic, etc, so I do not see that this model called metaphysics are 'first principles'.) Just as we have no basis for saying that mathematics exists outside of our minds for us to "discover" -- 2+2=4 is not self-evidently a mathematical 'truth' "existing in the universe" for us to 'discover', but rather our own description of what happens when someone finds a collection of "|" and puts || and || together to make ||||; one could describe this as 4*1/2+4*1/2=4, or conceive of things as groups of ||||| and say instead 5-3+5-3=4; there are many ways to conceive of reality, and 2+2=4 is simply one possible description we have made of the reality we see; it's not clear that "the number two" exists if no human is alive to define it into being -- so it appears to me we have no basis for saying that "pure act" and "potentiality" are "real things" rather than parts of a model we've invented to describe what we see. So yes, this metaphysics may imply that God is part of that system, and mathematics implies that the number 0 is part of its system, but I don't see the basis for declaring that either model we've created (mathematics or metaphysics) is "actually 100% true fact", rather than merely an invented model of observation -- that these systems exist in reality external to us, rather than only in our own minds.

(As an aside, one can refute the 'fine-tuning argument' with this logic, that the fine-tuning is merely a consequence of our limited mathematical models overlapping, not an observed feature of the universe itself. In other words, there is a fixed gap between our observation of reality and reality "as it exists without us" that we cannot breach: If God exists, He must tell us if we are correct. It seems to me we cannot know otherwise.)

Last edited by ForumUser (10/31/2017 7:51 pm)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Ficino,

Metaphysical arguments are needed to show how not that there appears to be change, but how it is possible that there actually is change.

I am not convinced. Both Plato and Aristotle recognized that phaenomena present strong evidence for conclusions. You start talking about metaphysical arguments needed to show how the obvious is possible. and Hermann Goering reaches for his revolver. A change: a revolver is pointed at you, and it wasn't pointed at you before. Do we need reams of metaphysics to tell ourselves how such changes can be possible?

Parmenides wrote a poem for an audience. The goddess spoke to a poetical youth in a chariot pulled by horses who knew the way. There was a goddess, a youth, horses ... Was there more than one thing, and was there motion and change? Was Parmenides trying to influence anyone in any way? If anyone was influenced, was that person different from Parmenides, and did that person undergo a change? Parmenides' whole poem, esp. the second part, admits the reality of this world of becoming. But we already knew it before we read the poem. It is reported that Parmenides wrote the laws of Elea. He did so, believing that really there is but one thing, and nothing changes? 

I am trying to remember the passage in Aristotle where the Stagyrite says that some people construct arguments for truths that are in themselves more evident than are the conclusions of those arguments. Even Aquinas wrote that it is established by the senses that things are in motion.

The problem that Parmenides posed, how can something come into being from non-being, is a manipulation of language. Parmenides' own behavior, to the extent we can reconstruct any of it, gives the lie to the problem. It's a pseudo-question. If Parmenides' goddess is constructing an argument and delivering it to a youth, she is already enmeshed in the flux of change.





 

Last edited by ficino (10/31/2017 8:16 pm)

Plato and Aristotle advanced human thought by proposing ways in which we can talk about change. They did not prove that change occurs. Human experience of change is prior to arguments about how to talk about change.

I suspect we are in agreement, actually.

Last edited by ficino (10/31/2017 8:41 pm)

Cool. But where does this leave all of us with ForumUser's questions? 

I really want to sink my teeth into the problem, what work do notions like "actuality" and "potentiality" and "form" actually do? When the scientist has given an exhaustive account of what happens when ice melts, and then the metaphysician triumphantly intones, "the heat in the candle actualized the ice's potentiality to be liquid," I'm left with a "Well, duh" reaction. What work do "act, potentiality, essence, prime matter" do that isn't being done by scientists using other systems of symbols? The A-T chap says, "the shape of Hermes is in the block of marble potentially but is not in the song of the bird potentially, because extension is not in the being of the song," and I reply again, well, duh. We knew that already, but thanks for the vocabulary.

So I am glad that Aristotle gave us ways of talking about being and about nature and change. If I want to know about how something works, I seek out a functional explanation, not "the Unmoved Mover/God did it."